I Hate Your Litter

When I was a kid, I littered all the time. When you're a kid, you don't understand shit like the ozone layer and greenhouse gasses. Oh, there's an invisible shield hovering over us, protecting the human race from incineration via the sun? That's interesting. But do you know what's even more interesting? Discussing whether or not the new Optimus Prime is really the same as the old Optimus Prime, because I think it's a SHAM!

Kids are fucking dumb. I was fucking dumb. So, I threw shit out the car window whenever my mom wasn't paying attention. The bigger the better. I knew there wouldn't be severe repercussions, so I would crack the window and drop shit out the window and watch it flutter into the wind, most likely landing in a lake and hopefully strangling some Canadian Geese, because they are the spawn of Satan. But still, look how quickly it fucking flew away - the window is like my own vacuum cleaner!

And this is the reason why I give kids a break in this area of concern. But once you turn say, 17, you should definitely be finished littering. Because before you turn 17 and can drive everywhere, you still have the need to dump empty beer and Popov Vodka bottles in the woods and into reservoirs (fuck you, Manhattan tap water). It's just the way it is. But there are so many fat, lazy fucking assholes on this planet, it's inevitable that many of them will continue littering well into adulthood.

Recently, while waiting for a subway in balmy 95 degree underground steam-heat, fighting off the urge to walk back above ground and jump into the East River and hope for the poison in the water melt me, I noticed a 50+ year old woman eating a big bag Cheetos nearby. Eating is a polite way of saying: she was stuffing her stubby Carney-hands into the bag and transferring handfuls of orange shit into her fucking face faster than the speed of light. Obviously, I had a problem with this immediately, because the last thing Mrs. Augustus Gloop and her knock-knees needed was more saturated fat pulsing through her clogged arteries. Also, she was wiping the cheese dust on her pants, which made me want to simultaneously vomit and cry, because that shit is made out of equal parts processed-cow-asshole, grease, and horror. When she finished, she wiped her hands clean and then chucked the empty bag onto the tracks, and then went back to wiping sweat from her head and developing heart disease. And she tossed the garbage so nonchalantly - no sly peaking to see if anyone was watching her actions, no behind-the-back toss, no worries at all. Just, HUM-DEE-DUM, HERE YOU GO PUBLIC, HERE'S SOME MORE GARBAGE FOR YOU. CARE? OH I DON'T CARE, AS LONG AS I'M MILKED AND SHELTERED AND FED FRESH HAY WHY WOULD I GIVE A FUCK IF I AM A SHITTY PERSON?

Now, I hate the MTA. I fucking wish the MTA would go bankrupt so everyone was forced to ride bicycles around like we were in 19th century London. The MTA fucking sucks. Everything about the MTA sucks - the perpetually skyrocketing fares, suffocation by overcrowding, changing a local to an express mid-ride, no motherfucking air conditioner when it's 150 degrees outside - but I still have the decency to not throw my garbage all over the place. Would I like to upturn garbage cans and start small fires and maybe incite a riot and overturn a subway car and maybe corral a bunch of the Mole People and train them to be my own personal army? Of course I would. But I don't.

The worst part about the incident with the lady was, there was a trash can about thirteen feet away from where she was standing. And I know that this woman saw it. But she decided that exerting minimal amounts of energy TO WADDLE over to it would be too much of a hassle, so she said, fuck it. Well guess what lady, WE ALL WANT TO SAY FUCK IT. Who doesn't want to just toss their garbage everywhere? Hey, let me see if I can loft this empty soda bottle onto that brownstone's roof! I think about doing shit like that all day long. Finished with my coffee? I want to launch it onto the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza and hopefully hit one of those middle-aged losers pretending he's Kim Yu-Na. Oh look, I'm done with my sandwich - that Cartier storefront window looks like it needs some motherfucking pastrami and spicy mustard on it! It's a constant impulse that my brain has. Just do it, man, just fucking do it. Everyone else is doing it. Throw your Dunkin Donuts cup on the street. It will feel soooo good.

But I don't do it. I can't. I don't want to be like that fat blob in the subway. I have zero discipline with most things in life, the least I can do is wait four seconds to rid my hands of garbage and toss it in one of the 8,000 garbage cans lining the street.

The next instance happened at a drive-thru window in my hometown, which is filled with entitled douchebags who all deserve to be beaten with a bamboo cane. I was stuck behind this chic, maroon minivan that was bursting at the seams with insane little kids fighting and yelling and rocking the car back and forth on its axles. I never got a look at the mom in the driver's seat - all I saw was her turkey-neck arm sticking out. But I could tell she was annoying just by the way her profile jerked around and shook as she screamed at everyone inside the car, and then gestured at the person serving her to hand her 900,000 extra napkins. After she finished passing along the food from the drive-thru, she pulled over to a parking spot near the exit and began heaving trash from inside her car onto the pavement. Bottles, used tissues, food, empty bottles of Windex. My jaw dropped - it was fucking INSANE. I was in shock. Literally, my body was humming. She then lobbed about half the napkins she bitched for RIGHT BACK OUT THE WINDOW. Before I had a chance to fully process what happened, she was pulling out into the street and then she was gone. I hoped that later on in the night, she would be mauled by a Kodiac Bear, but I couldn't find anything in the papers about it the next day. Fucking Karma, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU FOR THIS ONE???

We are fucked. As a society, we are fucked. It's beyond repair. And I've come to terms with the logistics of this. But I will never be able to comprehend how someone just unloads their trash so I can sit next it while I'm trying to find a good song to tune-out the Jamaican lady who's holding up a tattered Bible and preaching about something but no one can understand her because she's screaming and angry and totally contradicting herself. But at least we have Earth Week!